Mastodon | Image Credits:Mastodon <\/p>\n
Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can\u2019t comply with Mississippi\u2019s age verification law<\/a> \u2014 the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state<\/a> \u2014 because it doesn\u2019t have the means to do so.<\/p>\n The social nonprofit explains that Mastodon doesn\u2019t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.<\/p>\n The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week<\/a> between<\/a> Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, \u201cthere is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.\u201d (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network<\/a> that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub<\/a> protocol.)<\/p>\n \u201cAnd this is why real decentralization matters,\u201d said Rochko.<\/p>\n Masnick pushed back, questioning why Mastodon\u2019s individual servers, like the one Rochko runs at mastodon.social, would not also be subject to the same $10,000 per user fines for noncompliance with the law.<\/p>\n At the time of our reporting<\/a> on this exchange, Mastodon gGmbH, the community-funded nonprofit organization, didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n On Friday, however, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that while Mastodon\u2019s own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not \u201chave the means to apply age verification\u201d to its services.<\/p>\n That is, the Mastodon software doesn\u2019t support it. The Mastodon 4.4 release<\/a> in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users\u2019 ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored.<\/p>\n That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.<\/p>\n